About Me

I'm a semi-retired professional man, living in the Midwestern United States. This blog is a personal blog and is not directly connected with my professional practice (although I may draw upon my professional experiences, as well as my personal experiences, in writing my blog posts). This is a place for personal, not professional, opinions.

The Blogroll

January 2014

01/26/2014

“And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes--you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love...”---Fyodor Doestoyevsky

So many of us focus our sight on anything other than T.S. Eliot's revered "permanent things."

I recently read an editorial in The Wall Street Journal by Peter Funt, the "heir" to the Candid Camera show franchise started by his late father, Allen. In it, Peter worries about the effect of a popular culture in which so much is treated as "disposable."

To treat the present as disposable—so that, in effect, we gradually shrink our past—is something else.

[...]

One of Snapchat's slogans is "There is value in the ephemeral." Roughly translated: There is no point in taking good photos, or worrying about your appearance, or fretting over bad behavior, because it's all going to disappear quickly, only to be replaced by the next batch of evanescence. Life is a blur and leaves no traces.

[...]

Nothing viewed only in the context of the moment—a photo, a child's drawing, an item of clothing—is as meaningful or instructive as something viewed over time in the context of history and our experiences.

We don't even seem to value truth as much as we used to—whether in government, the news media or relationships. It's all so fleeting. The big picture, it seems, has been shattered into countless smaller pictures, so easily deleted.

Funt's opinions struck even deeper within me as I read a review by Catesby Leigh in that same newspaper this weekend (sorry, this one requires a paid subscription) of the bronze sculpture "The Dying Gaul," a marble copy (thought to have been made in the first or second century A.D.) of which is temporarily on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The statue is, as its title suggests, of a warrior of Gaul who is dying. The original was commissioned by Attalos I of Pegamon in Asia Minor to celebrate his victory over tribes of marauding Gauls about 230 B.C. It "represents the best of Hellenistic humanism in its deeply moving ennoblement of a barbarian adversary." It pays tribute to the heroic, manly virtues of a defeated enemy, a concept that might seem foreign to a world in which the word "honor" has been devalued and the word "manly" reviled as a remnant of an oppressive patriarchal frame of mind that we post-moderns have "evolved" beyond.

Leigh asserts that the statue's sculptor "saw a cosmic significance in this work, in which we experience the portrayal of greatness of spirit in the face of a cruel fate as a symphony in a minor key--a symphony whose tragic grandeur unfolds for us in space and in time."

Obviously, these are eternal, transcendent themes. This piece of art is intended to embody these themes and to communicate them to future generations who behold it.

What a tragedy that we value sand sculptures, skyscraper-draping, and other forms of "ephemeral art" that are meant to be temporarily enjoyed on a level no deeper than any other piece of eye candy, then "deleted" with the rest of the flotsam. What an equal tragedy that some "artists" believe that the loss of a piece of their art is of no consequence because "there's more where that came from." No, if it's actually a work of lasting value, then there is not "more where that came from," no more so than "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is just more of the same old "The Sun Also Rises."

If it's art, it communicates something unique and something important, some "truth" as the artist perceives the truth. It's meant not to be seen and then disposed of, but to survive and to inform future generations. Unless, of course, you care not for the concepts of "art" or "truth" and if you believe that this brief time during which you inhabit the Earth is all that matters to you. Then, naturally, everything is fleeting and deleting your art is of no consequence. After all, it's all evanescence.

01/20/2014

A small lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him an opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.--E.H. Chapin

You'd think after decades as a lawyer that people who lie would no longer faze me. To the contrary, I continue to be nonplussed by the people I occasionally encounter who lie as a matter of course. They'll lie about anything and everything, to the extent that I'm convinced that they wouldn't understand the concept of the truth if it ran up and bit them in the backside.

I recall sitting in one the most exclusive private clubs in Dallas in the late 1980s, while the man across the table from me, the Chairman and CEO of a savings and loan that I had recently "fired" as a client of the large law form that I was then a shareholder amd director of, leaned over the table, looked me square in the eye, and declared, "Kevin, we are NOT crooks!" Within a year, he, and other senior officers of his institution, were either convicted of, or pled guilty to, bank fraud, and were sentenced to serve real time in a federal penitentiary. Yet, as we exited the club, the senior partner of the law firm who accompanied me to that meeting, told me that while he wasn't going to countermand my withdrawal from representing the client (a hard fact, since I was the only attorney at that time with the skill set to perform the work), he wanted me to understand the difficulty he and others at the firm had with my decision because of the loss of revenue to the firm.

Recently, I've run into a senior bank officer who lies often, yet poorly. She blames others for acts or omissions that are patently false and easily proved to be false. Yet, she is protected by her superior because she "gets the job done." Not quickly or well, and usually with much more personal animosity than would be the case if she simply attempted to refrain from lying. However, that, apparently, is not a concern to her boss, who believes that truthfulness takes a back seat to "bidness."

It makes no sense from a practical standpoint to rely on a liar to do anything. How would you know that it's being done at all, much less correctly? You'll never get the straight story. It makes no sense to me to tolerate lying, regardless of the moral failure, which is substantial.

Even more mystifying to me is how the mind of the liar operates. I've had people even lie to me about things that are so easily exposed as lies (such as whether or not they read my blog) that I must assume that lying must be compulsive with them. They simply cannot help themselves.

How in the world do they live with themselves? Is it by reason of the "compartmentalization" that I recently discussed? Do they lie to themselves so repeatedly and so well that they are incapable of distinguishing truth from lie? Are they sociopathic or amoral?

Whatever the reason, I fully recognize and accept the inescapable fact that some people lie, and that some people lie repeatedly. Nevertheless, I will never understand how such people can sleep at night, or why other people can not only tolerate, but in some cases, actively defend such dishonesty.

01/15/2014

"Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value, and identity. But this revelation remains impossible as long as we are the prisoner of our own egotism. I cannot find myself in myself, but only in another. My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior 'package.' The package is totally unimportant. What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person. And this message, this secret, is not fully revealed to me unless at the same time I am able to see and understand the mysterious and unique worth of the one I love."---Thomas Merton, "Love and Living"

As usual, Merton is onto something. While I think that when he refers to "faults" and "imperfections of the exterior package," he refers to physical imperfections, and while I do not think that he means that a lover should overlook or ignore the defects in his beloved's character that hinder her in acting "rightly," he must find that whatever her "faults" might be, they do not overshadow her essential worth in his eyes. He must accept her with her faults and still find her worthy of his love. Otherwise, he does not truly "love" her.

"Love" is an easily abused word in this culture. Often, it stands for nothing more than a superficial sexual or emotional attraction that, to be sustained, involves deliberately blinding oneself to the imperfections of the other, in order to continue the emotional or sexual "high" that would otherwise be squashed by truly acknowledging the fact that you don't respect the inner qualities of your "lover." Contrary to the popular saying, true love is not only not blind, it sees with a crystal clarity the strengths and weaknesses of the lover. What the "true lover" ultimately decides, however, is that his lover's essential qualities are worthy of his love, notwithstanding any external physical, or internal character, imperfections his lover may possess. He doesn't "overlook" them, he assigns them their proper, subordinate place in his evaluation.

Reflecting on these truths, I realize how I have failed to love properly in my life. I understand how in some instances in the past I have focused on flaws of a beloved that, while not unimportant, should not have overridden a balanced and honest judgment of the essential worth of the beloved. I have failed not only to see properly, I have also failed to evaluate properly what I did see "through a glass, darkly."

These insights came to me very recently, when I was being cranky, acting the role of the pissant, a role I play naturally and with a gusto born of a lifetime of practice. My wife had every right to tell me to do something physically impossible to myself. Instead, she refused to be provoked or to strike back angrily to my brusqueness. When I asked her--in classic passive-aggressive fashion--what her problem was (she had a pained expression on her face, which I mistook for anger when it was, in fact, concern), she walked up to me, took my face in her hands, and said "I just want you to be happy."

Those are moments of self-revelation, in which you understand your inherent limitations and the pain you have caused others because of those limitations. However, you also understand that there is one person who understands you better than you understand yourself. She sees your faults, your limitations, yet she also lets you know without a doubt that she accepts you with those faults and limitations and that they cannot destroy your worth in her eyes.

Through her eyes she shows me an estimate of my worth.

An old dog learns a new trick.

I have been wrong about many things in my life, including some of the conclusions I have shared on this blog. About this one thing, however, I think I am right.

01/08/2014

“When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.”---Thomas Merton